The Meaning of Vocation by A.J

Copyright © 2004 The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University 11 The Meaning of Vocation BY A.J. CONYERS “Vocation” is distorted by two disastrous misunderstandings: a secularized idea of “career” and a monastic concept of the religious life. Both are less than the biblical idea of vocation, of which Jesus’ raising Lazarus is a rich image. Vocation is about being raised from the dead, made alive to the reality that we do not merely exist, but are “called forth” to a divine purpose. he meaning of the term “vocation,” even in the context of the church, but much more so in the world at large, has suffered at the hands of Tlinguistic habit. Like many terms that were once rich with religious implications, it has over time become first narrow in its association with only certain forms of religious life, and then secularized. While early in the life of the church, the teaching on vocation by Origen and Augustine would have included the call to every Christian, even to every human being, the later monastic movement so powerfully affected people’s notions of the ex- tent to which one might go in answer to a divine call that “vocation” came to be associated with that one role in the church. Luther and the Protestant Reformers sought to reintroduce the teaching that everyone, no matter their occupation, was a proper object of divine call. The correction was long overdue. But the unintended effect was to suggest that vocation had merely to do with occupation; thus the way was open to a purely bour- geois and secular use of the term. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the celebrated young German theologian who was executed in a German prison during World War II, thought that the typical Protestant teaching tended finally to suggest “the justification and sanctifi- cation of secular institutions.”1 In its Biblical roots it must mean more than 12 Vocation that, thought Bonhoeffer. For vocation “in the New Testament sense, is never a sanctioning of worldly institutions as such; its ‘yes’ to them always includes at the same time an extremely emphatic ‘no,’ an extremely sharp protest against the world.”2 The monastic system had at least provided the death-defying “no,” even if it had failed to adequately provide the life- affirming “yes” of Christian vocation. The meaning of vocation, for most Christians of the modern world, therefore, has been sorted out between “two disastrous misunderstandings.” Both misunderstandings, “the secular Protestant one and the monastic one” are less than the Pauline and biblical idea of vocation deserves, and less than the church has at times seen in its fullness. TOWARD AN AUTHENTICALLY CHRISTIAN DEFINITION The familiar term “vocation,” whether used in religious or secular contexts, is rooted in the Latin vocatio, meaning a “call,” a “summons,” or an “invitation,” and is related to Latin-based words such as “voice” and “in- voke.” The Greek word is klesis and is found in our words “cleric” and “ecclesiastical.” It is the root of the New Testament word for the Church, ekklesia, a point that can be over-stressed since assemblies of all kinds were referred to with the same term. However, to say that the church consists of those “called out” is significant for more reasons than can be traced through linguistic usage: it is the reality of being called by God to which the church has always attested. In order to disentangle the term “vocation” from both its religious and secular misunderstandings, and restore a sense of its original mystery and power, let’s examine how, at several points, it should be disengaged from modern assumptions. We must do this first because, in truth, it is a term that does not fit well in the philosophies that have sprung up in opposi- tion to a supernatural view of life—in other words, philosophies that are marked by the Enlightenment (during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies in the West) and its extended shadow that we call modern thought. In both Jewish and Christian contexts, the human sentiment of a divine call plays an important role, and gives to the society in which it is embed- ded a certain character that is distinctly non-modern. Four distinctions must come to mind. First, the idea of a call implies an agent outside of the one who is subject to the call. One does not simply “choose” a course of action, but one responds to a summons. A person might be “free” in either case; but in the case of one responding to vocation, the freedom is not an inner-directed impulse, but the use of the will to respond to an unforeseen and perhaps unknown reality. This summons is characteristic of various re- ports, in a great variety of instances, from the summons of Abraham and the divine election of Moses, to the call of Isaiah, the baptism of Jesus, the blinding of Paul, the spiritual apparitions of Joan of Arc, and the divine compulsions of Martin Luther. Characteristic of each case is the summons The Meaning of Vocation 13 that is external to the person who is called. Second, the summons is often against the will of the one who is called into service. Abraham at first doubted that God’s covenant with him could be fulfilled. Moses complained that the Israelites, to whom God sent him, had never listened to him and therefore neither would Pharaoh, “poor speaker that I am” (Exodus 6:12). Jeremiah, the Hebrew prophet, not only resisted the call, but continued to complain that God had overpowered him and placed him in an impossibly difficult circumstance, even protesting that God’s call had made him “like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter” (Jeremi- ah 11:19). Jonah attempted to flee from the Lord to Tarshish, rather than going to Nineveh where he had been called. Jesus prays to be delivered from his appointed calling. By way of contrast, we can think of the way early Enlightenment thinkers emphasized reason. The real character of their emphasis is now almost always lost. The false implication is that they (the ‘modern’ Enlightenment thinkers) emphasized reason while earlier ages neglected it, or preferred superstition and unreason. Yet, who indeed were more devoted to the arts of reason than the disciples of Aristotle in antiquity, or those who, in medi- eval times, submitted everything to reason in the most rigorous fashion, the schoolmen from Anselm to Aquinas and beyond? The specific way in which the Enlightenment used reason was as a re- To disentangle “vocation” from its religious placement for the idea of vocation. One could then and secular misunderstandings, and restore make reasoned choices. The true locus of personal deci- a sense of its original mystery and power, it sions was to be found in the individual who “thinks should be disengaged from modern assump- for himself,” as Kant would put it, and who de- tions. One does not simply “choose” a course clines to depend upon the “guidance of another.”3 of action, but one responds to a summons—a While vocation contradicts the will of the person be- summons that is often against the will of the ing called, reason is the instrument by which the one who is called into service. modern person thought his will could be enforced. Science, as Descartes said, is what can make us “the masters and possessors of Nature”—an extraordinary claim if we weren’t so used to these exaggerations! That reason does not have to be thought of in this individualistic way was shown by Gerhart Niemeyer when he said that the “creators of phi- losophy never spoke of reason in the way Enlightenment thinkers did.” In fact, what they said was closer to the idea of vocation: 14 Vocation Parmenides experienced the Is in a vision; Socrates, Plato, and others experienced being “drawn,” “pulled,” even “dragged” to the true reality beyond the cosmos. They respond to these experiences with something they call “the quest,” “the arduous way,” “the search,” clearly conveying that the authority of truth is not found in themselves, nor in their method, but in their participation in a higher reality. Their attitude was one of love of the cosmos and of divine wisdom. Where in the Enlightenment do we find mention of “love” to characterize the attitude towards the cosmos or divinity? Enlightenment focuses on the objects of knowledge which mind can convert from multiplicity to unity, or from unity to composing parts, all for the sake of human control and mastery over nature.4 Next, the calling involves in almost every case hardships that must be overcome in order to answer the summons. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Paul all found themselves under threat of death by their community. The very cen- tral fact of Jesus’ life and ministry is that he was called to die for the sake of others, and that he called others to follow the way of the Cross. Jesus’ moment of public vocation (his baptism) is followed by temptation in the wilderness. Paul’s vocation is accompanied by physical ailments, imprison- ment, beatings, and exile. Finally, from the point of view of answering to the summons, the greatest danger appears not in this kind of resistance, but in the possibility of being diverted or distracted from the goal. The whole of Joshua’s reitera- tion of the covenant with Israel, after they had settled the land of Canaan, was devoted to the threat and the consequences of being distracted from their promise to “serve the Lord” and to the warning against being temp- ted by other gods.

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